The Documentary Film in the United States

In the United States, the nonfiction film was primarily defined and sustained by the travelogue, which was filmed in foreign lands and shown at lectures and sideshows to introduce audiences to different cultures and exotic locations. In 1904, at the St. Louis Exposition, George C. Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World was particularly successful but did not reach the mythic proportions of the film made from President Teddy Roosevelt’s African safaris or Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. These kinds of travelogues appealed to the American public because they demonstrated a spirit of enterprise and adventure. This outlook underpins the Romantic tradition of filmmaking that begins with travelogues of the American West and comes to its fullest expression in the films of Robert Flaherty. It is he who most embodies the development of the documentary form as an objective tool of ethnography- -the scientific study of other cultures from a position “within” the community- -and anthropology.

His film Nanook of the North (1922), a study of Inuits of northern Canada, is acknowledged as one of the most influential films within the genre. It perhaps provides us with all the clues we require to define both the documentary and its acceptable limits. Flaherty’s films, which have been called“authored” films, are made with a specific intent: not merely to record the lives of the Inuits but to recall and restage a former, more“primitive” era of Inuit life. This nostalgic intent only serves to mythologize Inuit life and to some extent remove it from its real context, thus calling into question some of the inherent principles that we may assume are crucial in determining documentary “truth.”

Although Flaherty was an advocate of the use of lenses that could view the subject from a long distance so as not to affect unduly the behavior of the natives, and he filmed long, uninterrupted scenes at one time without stopping the camera instead of using complex editing, it is his intervention in the material that is most problematic when evaluating Nanook as a key documentary. Flaherty was not content merely to record events; he wanted to dramatize actuality by filming aspects of Inuit culture that he knew of from his earlier travels into the Hudson Bay area between 1910 and 1916. For example, he rebuilt igloos to accommodate camera equipment and organized parts of Inuit lifestyle to suit the technical requirements of filming under these conditions. In another of his documentaries, Moana (1926), Flaherty staged a ritual tattooing ceremony among the Samoan Islanders, recalling a practice that had not been carried out for many years. In Man of Aran (1935) shark hunts were also staged and did not characterize the contemporary existence of the Aran Islanders.

John Grierson, the British documentary maker, argues that Flaherty becomes intimate with the subject matter before he records it and thus,“He lives with his people till the story is told ‘out of himself’ and this enables him to ‘make the primary distinction between a method which describes only the surface value of a subject and a method that more explosively reveals the reality of it.”” This seems to legitimize Flaherty’s approach because Nanook, Moana, and Man of Aran all succeed in revealing the practices of more“primitive”cultures- cultures which in Flaherty’s view embody a certain kind of simple and romanticized social perfection.

Clearly then, Flaherty essentially uses actuality to illustrate dominant themes and interests that he is eager to explore. In some ways, Flaherty ignores the real social and political dimensions informing his subjects’ lives and indeed does not engage with the darker side of human sensibility, preferring instead to prioritize larger, more mythic and universal topics. There is almost a nostalgic yearning in Flaherty’s work to return to a simpler, more physical, preindustrial world, where humankind could pit itself against the natural world, slowly but surely harnessing its forces to positive ends. Families and communities are seen as stoic and noble in their endeavors, surviving often against terrible odds. Flaherty obviously manipulates his material and sums up one of the apparent ironies in creating documentary“truth” by suggesting that“Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”

1.In the United States, the nonfiction film was primarily defined and sustained by the travelogue, which was filmed in foreign lands and shown at lectures and sideshows to introduce audiences to different cultures and exotic locations. In 1904, at the St. Louis Exposition, George C. Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World was particularly successful but did not reach the mythic proportions of the film made from President Teddy Roosevelt’s African safaris or Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. These kinds of travelogues appealed to the American public because they demonstrated a spirit of enterprise and adventure. This outlook underpins the Romantic tradition of filmmaking that begins with travelogues of the American West and comes to its fullest expression in the films of Robert Flaherty. It is he who most embodies the development of the documentary form as an objective tool of ethnography- -the scientific study of other cultures from a position “within” the community- -and anthropology.